I wrote this book accidentally, only realizing half way through that it might be worth converting my blog series into a book. The blog series was a set of posts responding to a collection of essays entitled Evidence for God: 50 Arguments for Faith from the Bible, History, Philosophy, and Science. But I realized that my argument for atheism is the same as a set of reasons for why theistic arguments fail to persuade me. And 50 arguments would surely cover many of the main reasons people have for belief.

At some point, I thought I might make some of my blog into a book, so I idly mentioned cover design to my friend Joshua Wright. And so began an entertaining art project. First, we needed a concept. I had an idea of Lady Justice, weighing the evidence, which fitted with the book’s theme. But Josh saw some deeper levels to the analogy. What if considering the evidence was an act of rebellion? Graffiti on a structure that was beginning to crumble. I had used similar analogies in some of my writing and so the idea evolved.

This is an excerpt from Evidence Considered: A Response to Evidence for God. Evidence for God is a book edited by William Dembski and Michael Licona that presents fifty arguments for faith from the Bible, history, philosophy, and science. In this excerpt, I respond to the twenty-seventh chapter by Richard Spencer entitled: “Intelligent, Optimal, and Divine Design.” This is one of the chapters in the section of the book on the question of Jesus.

This is a second excerpt from a book called Evidence Considered: A Response to Evidence for God. Evidence for God is a book edited by William Dembski and Michael Licona that presents fifty arguments for faith from the Bible, history, philosophy, and science. In this excerpt, I respond to the twenty-first chapter by Richard Spencer entitled: “Intelligent, Optimal, and Divine Design.” This is one of the chapters in the science section of the book.

This is an excerpt from Evidence Considered: A Response to Evidence for God. Evidence for God is a book edited by William Dembski and Michael Licona that presents fifty arguments for faith from the Bible, history, philosophy, and science. This chapter responds to an essay by Gary Habermas entitled: “Near-Death Experiences: Evidence for an Afterlife?”

This is an excerpt from the Introduction of Evidence Considered: A Response to Evidence for God. I expect that most Christians will agree with most of what I have said, that some Christians will agree with all of it, and that nearly all Christians will agree with some of it. Christians should welcome a close and critical examination of apologetic arguments as part of their search for the truth. As Peter exhorted (1 Peter 3:15), they should be ready “to give the reason for the hope that you have.”

I used to have other reasons (meta arguments, in the sense that they do not use the text of the Bible directly) for accepting the validity of the claims of the Bible. Ultimately they do not matter—for me, the whole thing falls apart with the lack of credibility of the Bible, taken on its own terms, rather than based on some meta-argument. In other words, the biblical text is itself not credible where it matters (discussed in Section 3). But people use these meta-arguments to establish the credibility of the Bible, regardless of how incredible the text is, so I wanted to look at a few of them, and one in particular, which is the continued existence of the Christian church. I do not intend to look at this rigorously, but rather to point out a way that might be helpful to understand this and to explore where this kind of thinking might get us.